In later stages of the crusading strife Kings and Emperors of the Romans did indeed take their share; and the greatest success won by any crusaders since the first fell to the lot of the Emperor who more than any other drew down on his head the curses of the spiritual Rome. Conrad went and came back; the elder Frederick died on his march; but the second Frederick, alone of Emperors, alone of European kings, made his way within the long-fought-for walls, and wore a royal crown in the city of Godfrey and of David. Cursed first for not going on the crusade, then cursed again for going, cursed most of all for actually winning the prize of so many struggles, the King of Salem had to fall back on traditions older than Godfrey, older than David; he had to fall back on the kingdom of Melchizedek, to place on his own head the crown which no priestly hand would set there. That the Bishop of the Western Rome should strive to hinder the Emperor of the Western Rome from winning the noblest prize that any Emperor since Heraclius had won, shows more than any other tale in history what a power had sprung up in the bosom of the Empire to supplant the Empire itself. A King of France, a King’s son of England, might go on the now hopeless errand; no Emperor, no German king, was likely to go and seek the misbelievers in the Eastern lands with the memory of Frederick before his eyes. A day was to come when the misbelievers were to come and threaten Emperors and German kings in their own realm. But before that day came, one Emperor, fighting for the last fragment of Rome’s Eastern power, was to win by his fall such glory as no Emperor had for ages won by his triumphs. And, even in the moment of that glorious fall, he was doomed to show that the Bishops of the Western Rome could be as deadly in their friendship to the Cæsars of the East as they could be in their enmity to their own sovereigns, whether on the throne of Charles or on the throne of David.
I have already spoken of the event of the year 1204, the taking of Constantinople by the Latins, as the point at which we must place the end of the old and unbroken Empire of Rome in the East. High indeed among the crimes and follies of recorded history must we rank that exploit of princely freebooters in crusading garb which broke in pieces the ancient bulwark of Christendom, and left only feeble fragments which could not fail to be swallowed up one by one by the advancing Infidel. Men with the cross on their shoulders, with their swords hallowed to the service of the faith, turned aside from their calling to carve out realms for themselves at the cost of their fellow-Christians, and thereby to do the work of the misbeliever more thoroughly than he could ever have done it for himself. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the paths of the Eastern and Western Emperors had parted so far asunder that the rival claims of the Greek and the German representatives of Rome might well have died out in oblivion. But the Western Rome had now another representative whose claims could not die out. If her Emperor no longer cared to assert his right to the dominion of the world, her Bishop was ever ready to make the claim. The men of the West were taught to look on the Christian East as a schismatic land to be won back to the true obedience; they were taught that it was a worthy work to drive the pastors of the Eastern Churches from their thrones and to instal in their place dependents of the encroaching Bishop of the West. Vassals of Rome in her new character, a spiritual Prusias, a spiritual Herod, were to teach once more the lesson of bondage to Greece and Asia, to bid all lands look once more to the elder Rome as the judge that alone gave forth judgements which none might gainsay. It is indeed due to the memory of the great Innocent to remember that it was not at his bidding, but in direct disobedience to his straitest command, that Frank and Venetian turned their swords against Constantinople instead of wielding them for Jerusalem. It was not at his word or with his approval that men whose calling it was to rescue the Temple of the Lord from misbelieving masters, defiled the church of the Divine Wisdom as no unbelieving master has ever defiled it. But Innocent did not scruple to take advantage of the crimes which he had forbidden, and to enlarge his spiritual dominion by the help of the plunderers whom he had failed to call off from their work of plunder. And so the disunited East, a Christendom in which Christians had ceased to be brethren, stood a ready prey for the Infidel, strong in his unity, strong in the guidance of the mightiest line of princes to whom the championship of the Asiatic, now the Mussulman, side of the Eternal Question had ever fallen.
For we have reached the days of the Ottoman. Europe and Christendom had now to strive with a foe more terrible than Carthage or than Persia, more terrible than the Saracen of the East or of the West, more terrible than the Hun, the Avar, the Magyar, or the earlier tribes of his own Turkish stock. The Arab had cut the Empire short; but in cutting the Empire short, he had relieved it of provinces which were no source of true strength, and thereby he had given it for the first time somewhat of the life and vigour of a nation. The Seljuk Turk had conquered the lands which the Arab had ravaged but could never conquer; but he had conquered them only by making them a wilderness. He had fixed his throne at Nikaia, but he had fixed it there only to fall back again. If the Sultan of Rome ever dreamed that the Eastern Rome itself was to be his, his dream was of the kind which comes from the gate of ivory. But the vision of Othman was the vision of a seer to whom the future was laid open. He and his house were not to be beaten back till they had reared a dominion on Christian, on European, soil, which far more than outweighed the winning back of the most western land of Europe from Eastern masters. The Ottoman was to become, what no other of the many earlier invaders of his stock had ever become, not the mere passing scourge, but the indwelling and abiding oppressor of Christian and European lands. The Hun and the Avar had been driven back or swept away from the earth. The Bulgarian had bowed himself to Christian teaching; he had cast aside his barbarian speech, and had merged his national being in the national being of an European people. The Magyar had kept his name and his tongue; but he had made his way into the fellowship of Christendom and of Europe; only, to the abiding loss of the nations of South-Eastern Europe, his Christian teaching had come from the Western Rome. The Mongol had fixed himself on a far off march of Europe and Asia, to hold from thence an overlordship over the most distant and least known of European powers. The Ottoman was to do more than these. He was to do what the Arab and the Seljuk had striven in vain to do; he was to fix his seat in the New Rome itself. And more, he was to win the New Rome in the character of an European power, and to storm its walls by the hands of soldiers of European birth. When Mahomet pitched his camp before Constantinople, it was not, like the Saracen who came before him, in the character of a lord of Asia invading Europe; he came as one whose vast dominion on European soil had long hemmed in the Roman world in that corner of Thrace which he had kept as well nigh the last morsel to devour. The conqueror of Constantinople came as one who already ruled on the Danube, but who did not as yet rule on the Nile or the Euphrates. And he came as one who knew how to press into his service the choicest wits and the strongest arms of all the lands from the Danube to the Propontis as well as of the lands from the Propontis to the Halys. The institution of the Janissaries, that cruelest offshoot of the wisdom of the serpent, had turned the strength of every conquered people against itself, and had changed those who should have been the deliverers from oppression into the most trustworthy instruments of the oppressor. The ramparts of Constantinople were stormed by warriors of Greek, of Slavonic, and of Albanian blood; the dominions of the masters of Constantinople were administered by statesmen of European stock, once of Christian faith; whether the human prey kidnapped in childhood or the baser brood who, then as now, sold their souls for barbarian hire. In all the endless phases of the Eternal Question, never had the powers of evil yet devised such a weapon as this, the holding down of nations in bondage by the hands of the choicest of their own flesh and blood.
I would fain ask how many there are among those around me who bear in memory that this day on which we have come together[1] is the anniversary of the darkest day in the history of Christendom. The twenty-ninth of May, the day so long and so strangely honoured among us as the day of the birth and return of Charles the Second, bears about it in other lands the memory of events of greater moment in the history of the world. It is the day of the fall of the Eastern Rome, the martyr’s birthday of her last Emperor. It was on this day that the barbarian first seated himself on the throne of the Cæsars, that the infidel first planted the badge of Antichrist on the most glorious of Christian temples. From this day onwards the Christian East has been in mourning, mourning for the home of its Empire, for the holy place of its faith. On such a day as this there should go up no anthem of rejoicing, but the sad strain of the Hebrew gleeman who had seen a day of no less blackness; “O God, the heathen have come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled, and made Jerusalem an heap of stones.” But for the Hebrew seventy years only of sorrow were appointed; our captivity—for the captivity of the Eastern Rome is the captivity of all Christendom—has gone on now for four hundred and two and forty years as it is this day. Now, as then, barbarians sit encamped as a wasting horde in the fairest regions of the earth; now, as then, the profession of the Christian faith entails an abiding martyrdom on nations in their own land. And heavier still is the thought that not a few in Christian lands love to have it so. We daily hear the strange lesson that “British interests,” “imperial interests”—the interest perhaps of the usurer wrung from the life-blood of his victim—demand that we should do all that we can to prolong the rule of the oppressor, to prolong the bondage of the oppressed. We have seen the strange sight of English statesmen rejoicing, as at some worthy exploit of their hands, that they had given back to the rule of the Sultan, that is to the bondage of the unbelieving stranger in their own land, the men, the women, the children, for whom the swords of better men than they had wrought deliverance. With shame like this done in our own day, we can hardly turn round and throw stones even at the men of the Fourth Crusade. They at least sinned for the human motive of their own pelf; it is something for which no human motive can be found when men rejoice in the sorrows of the helpless lands which, after a glimpse of the light of freedom, were again thrust down into the night of bondage which that short glimpse of light has made more black.
Let us remember then, as our story brings the tale of the Eastern Rome to its end, that it was as it were in the night that has just passed that the last Christian worship was paid beneath the dome of Saint Sophia, that it was as it were by the morning light of this very day that the last Constantine took his post by the gate of Saint Rômanos, to die, when to die was all that he could do, for his Empire and for his faith. And yet there is one thought which casts a shadow over the end of the hero and of his power. The last Christian worship beneath the dome of Saint Sophia was a worship paid according to foreign rites, a worship from which the men of the Christian East shrank as from a defilement. So far had the ghostly power of the Western Rome spread its shadow over all lands, that the temporal help of the West could be won only, or rather could be promised only and never won, by treason to the old religious traditions of the East. It was a brighter moment in the memory of our fathers, a moment which has no fellow in our own memory, when three of the great powers of East and West, representing three of the great races of Europe, three of the great divisions of Christendom, Orthodox Russia, Catholic France, Protestant England, fought side by side to break the power of the barbarian on the great day of Navarino.
From the last European survival of the Eastern Rome—for ever remember that a more abiding survival still lingered for a while in Asia—let us turn to another power which we can now look upon as no more than a survival, the last direct survival of the Western Rome. From Constantinople let us turn to Vienna, from the Palaiologos to the Habsburg, from the last Constantine to the first Leopold. For two hundred and thirty years the flood of Ottoman conquest had swept on; it was at last to be stemmed. The Turk appeared, as he had appeared already, before what we must now perchance call the Imperial city of the West. But he fared in another sort from that in which he had fared before the Imperial city of the East. He had made his way into Constantinople; he could not make his way into Vienna. He made his way into Constantinople over the corpse of a slaughtered Emperor; from Vienna he was beaten back, but it was not by the arm of an Emperor that he was beaten back. No king of another land came to the help of Constantine; a king of another land did come to the help of Leopold. Constantine fell by the sword of a foe that was too strong for him; Leopold found a helper who was stronger than his foe, and devoted the full turnings and searchings of an Imperial mind to find out with how little sacrifice of Imperial dignity he could pay some feeble thanks to the man who had saved his throne and life. Vienna was saved for Christendom; it never shared the fate of Belgrade and Buda. But it was the sword of the Slave, the sword of the Pole, that saved it. Look on a hundred years, and the debt is paid in full. Poland is wiped out from the list of nations, and the house that the Pole had saved takes its share of the spoils of its deliverer.
I have ended my tale of Rome, my tale of Rome in her many shapes and stages, in the last feeble survivals of her power, in the more strange survivals of her mere style. Once more I have to meet you before the year, as years in this place are reckoned, comes to its end. As I began by speaking of a world on which Rome had not yet risen, I must end by speaking of a world from which Rome has passed away.